Vermont Legislature Votes to Ban Fracking

“We don’t want to be shoot­ing chem­i­cals into our ground­wa­ter in pur­suit of gas that does not exist,” Governor Shumlin said Friday after the House vote.

In April, while unveil­ing a new geo­logic map of Vermont, Shumlin again expressed his oppo­si­tion to frack­ing in Vermont.

No gas frack­ing is now tak­ing place in Vermont.Geologists have said Vermont lacks the abun­dant nat­ural gas under­ly­ing New York and Pennsylvania. But the same shale for­ma­tion that has sup­ported com­mer­cial frack­ing oper­a­tions in Quebec extends south along Lake Champlain in Vermont.

Fracking extracts nat­ural gas by inject­ing mil­lions of gal­lons of water, sand and chem­i­cals under high pres­sure into shale rock for­ma­tions to frac­ture the rock and release the gas. Giant hold­ing ponds or tanks are needed to store the chem­i­cally con­t­a­m­i­nated waste water that comes back up the hole after wells have been fractured.

The tech­nol­ogy has been in use for decades, but only recently has the indus­try devel­oped the capac­ity to drill hor­i­zon­tally within the rock formations.

Horizontal frack­ing requires mas­sive amounts of water and poten­tially toxic chem­i­cals. But indus­try secrecy about the chem­i­cals injected into the shale has made it dif­fi­cult for sci­en­tists and gov­ern­ment agen­cies to get the facts on health and envi­ron­men­tal impacts of fracking.

The Obama admin­is­tra­tion Friday issued a pro­posed rule that would require oil and gas com­pa­nies to pub­licly dis­close the chem­i­cals used in hydraulic frac­tur­ing oper­a­tions on fed­eral pub­lic and Indian lands – but only after frac­tur­ing oper­a­tions have been completed.

Vermont State Senator Ginny Lyons, who chairs the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee, said that until it is clearer what chem­i­cals are used in frack­ing and the exact con­se­quences for Vermont’s ground­wa­ter, the prac­tice should be banned.

“There have been over 1,000 instances of … water con­t­a­m­i­na­tion at sites in close prox­im­ity to frack­ing wells between 2008 and 2012 in the United States, so the con­t­a­m­i­na­tion is a con­cern,” Lyons told the “Times Argus” news­pa­per in April.

The cur­rent fracking-enabled nat­ural gas boom across the United States has poi­soned drink­ing water, pol­luted air and sick­ened peo­ple liv­ing near gas wells.

“Fracking has caused enor­mous prob­lems with under­ground water con­t­a­m­i­na­tion and above ground waste disposal—entire streams have been destroyed,” said author and cli­mate change activist, Bill McKibben, who is a scholar in res­i­dence in envi­ron­men­tal stud­ies at Vermont’s Middlebury College.

“A ban on this process makes sense, if for no other rea­son than it will keep the oil indus­try from pump­ing lob­by­ing dol­lars into the state,” said McKibben.

In Washington, DC, The American Petroleum Institute called the Vermont legislature’s move “irresponsible.”

Rolf Hanson, API’s senior direc­tor of state gov­ern­ment rela­tions, said that the deci­sion by the Vermont leg­is­la­ture to issue a statewide ban on the use of hydraulic frac­tur­ing is “short­sighted and uninformed.”

“The deci­sion by the Vermont leg­is­la­ture to pass a statewide ban on hydraulic frac­tur­ing fol­lows an irre­spon­si­ble path that ignores three major needs: jobs, gov­ern­ment rev­enue and energy secu­rity,” said Hanson.

“An unin­formed ban on a proven tech­nol­ogy used for over 60 years is short-sighted and irre­spon­si­ble, par­tic­u­larly when Vermont ben­e­fits year-round from nat­ural gas safely pro­duced in neigh­bor­ing states and provinces,” said Hanson.

“The Vermont Legislature deserves tremen­dous praise for hav­ing the courage to stand up to all of the lob­by­ing, the full page ads and the legal threats of the oil and gas indus­try,” said Paul Burns, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the non­profit Vermont Public Interest Research Group. “This is a shot that will be heard, if not around the world then at least around the country.”

“Vermonters were able to see through the smoke­screen put out by the gas indus­try,” said VPIRG orga­nizer Leah Marsters. “They under­stand the threat that frack­ing poses to pub­lic health, as well as our air, land and water.”

According to a minor­ity staff report released last year by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce, more than 650 com­monly used frack­ing prod­ucts con­tain chem­i­cals that are “known or pos­si­ble human car­cino­gens, reg­u­lated under the Safe Drinking Water Act, or listed as haz­ardous air pollutants.”